


one step, two step

by jackgyeoms



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fluff, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 23:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6062428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackgyeoms/pseuds/jackgyeoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about surviving is that sometimes, you've just got to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.</p>
<p>
  <i>Doctor Packard calls it PTSD.<br/>Poe's feels weighed down by the letters, but is glad for it. Perhaps then he won't float away.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	one step, two step

 

He's running on fumes the night he gets back. Body still aching from the torture, from the crash, from the rough ride home, Poe is so exhausted that he falls asleep the second after he falls into bed. He sleeps through the night, and into his worst memories, as fresh as the wounds on his body.

Wexley wakes him up, and Poe comes back to the waking world with rawness in his throat and sweat against his brow. Wexley says he was screaming, but Poe promises he's okay, tells himself that it isn't a lie if he truly believes it.

During the nights that follow, he wonders why Finn never comes to save him. He hates that more, he thinks, and crushes the thought until it's nothing but ash.

He can save himself, Poe says. He doesn't need saving anyway, he corrects. It's not fair to put Finn under that pressure, he whispers.

Finn might be dead, a part of him says. He might not, another hopes.

Poe rolls over, stares at his window and waits for the light to stretch over the horizon.

*

Flying is his freedom. In the cockpit, there is no room for outside thought - any hesitation and the battle might take a different turn. He won't allow that to happen. So his mind is filled with mechanics and flight paths, adrenaline making his blood pound louder than the voices in his comms, and Poe can finally breathe.

He tells the General that when she asks. The meeting is a retelling of events, of the information that is extracted and what has been gathered. He skims over parts he prefers are kept to the past, but she notices, of course she does, he thinks, she's General Leia, after all.

"Are you okay?"

"As fine as I can be," he says with a convincing smile.

She watches him for a long moment. "You should go to medical. Get someone to have a look at you."

"General, I've been to-"

"To look at you _properly_." The way she stresses that word, she knows he's hiding something.

"If you order it General," Poe insists, and she's quick to respond.

"I do."

He ducks his head in recognition, accepts, but fights when she tells him to take a few days. It isn't what he needs, he says, but they are a shield to the fear of what days just him and the wound will do to him. She gives him a condition, firm and strong as is her hand - I get any reports that things with you are not as you claim, you'll take a month, affective immediately. He smiles, agrees and makes a note to himself - at least until the job is done, there will be no cracks for him to fall into.

*

Doctor Packard calls it PTSD.

Poe's feels weighed down by the letters, but is glad for it. Perhaps then he won't float away.

*

He finds BB-8, and with the droid comes Finn.

BB-8 whirrs towards him, beeps greetings and you're alive he said you were dead. Poe rests his hand on BB-8's head and apologises for not being able to come back for it. BB-8 slams into his ankles for that one, indignant as if it couldn't quite believe that's what Poe thought it was mad about. Poe laughs and actually feels like he means it.

Poe has never had the pleasure of running into somebody's arms, until Finn calls his name, voice elated and disbelieving, and takes aborted steps forward. The distance is closed and arms grapple around each other, fingers clenching into leather, catching hem lines and generally just trying to get closer.

"BB-8 says you saved him," Poe declares, and the unit croons at his feet in confirmation.

Finn says, "It wasn't just me." But it was when you saved me, he thinks. Finn's smile widens and his eyes sparkle, and he adds, "I'll tell you about it one day."

A day that Poe will look forward to. "Either way, you completed my mission," he states, and doesn't add you brought my friend home. He figures that part goes without saying. His gaze flickers and - "That's my jacket."

Finn's mouth forms an 'o' and he rolls his shoulders, makes to remove the jacket in question. Poe presses down on the crook of his elbow, shakes his head. "No. Keep it. It suits you."

Finn pauses for a moment and then smiles, too wide, too blinding, and straightens it over his chest. Poe watches the slide of his hands with too much interest, his eyes lingering on the way the collar presses against his neck just so. Suits you. He rolls his lips, rubs his fist into Finn's shoulder. "It's good to see you again Finn."

Finn rocks with the movement and laughs, echoing the sentiment back. His voice sits with Poe until nightfall.

*

When he introduces Finn to General Leia, Finn seems surprised that they know about him. Leia is careful with her speech, insistent with her orders and Finn spills the beans on more than they had hoped for.

Poe thanks him for his help in a darkened corner, bodies moving urgently around them. Time is of an essence. Finn smiles - he does that a lot, Poe realises, and wonders whether he was always like that or if it's what came from freedom - and swears that the First Orders plans will be stopped.

"Because of you," Poe says.

"And you," Finn adds.

"I signed up for this, you didn't. That makes a difference," Poe murmurs.

"I signed up for this the moment they took Rey," Finn admits.

"The girl on Jakku? I think BB-8 likes her," Poe muses, because in the short conversation they'd had, the girl's name had been dropped like a favourite track and the fact that his BB unit was so gushy only told of good things. Finn is looking at his feet when Poe claps a hand on his shoulder, squeezes comfortingly. "We'll get her back."

"We'll get her back," Finn echoes. His expression hardens at the edges with determination, and Poe is entranced by it.

"We leave in 8 hours. Get some sleep," Poe orders after a moment, lets his hand fall away however reluctantly. "You'll need it."

Finn breathes and nods, scrubs a hand down his face tiredly. "I'll try." His hand curves around his jaw, his eyes dart across Poe's vision. "You should, too. You look exhausted."

And he feels it, deep in his bones. Like a pressure against the back of his eyes, or a weight to his limbs. He's seen himself in the mirror. There's only so much a smile can hide. Poe gives a one armed shrug. "I've been having trouble sleeping."

Finn's eyebrows furrow. "Because of -"

Poe cuts him off. "Probably. It's fine, I'm dealing with it. You just focus on you, alright? We'll get your friend back."

He gets called away before Finn can reply - last minute checks on engines, and he has a briefing to conduct - but he feels the weight of Finn's stare upon him until he's left the room.

*

Packard gives him sleeping pills that first meeting. A quick fix, and Poe admits there are no terrors. But he wakes with a shroud over his head that muffles his senses, and hands that don't feel like this own.

He decides he prefers the screams to the lack of control.

*

Their mission is a success and a failure in many ways.

Starkiller Base is destroyed, reduced to molten rock that will float through space for eternity as a monument to the triumph over evil; Han Solo is dead; the flight team has been burnt in half; Luke Skywalker has been found; R2-D2 has awoken; Finn is comatose.

Poe knows the tragedies of war, but the lose of his people, his friends, is nearly breaking. He makes the visits to the families himself, and mourns. A vigil is built upon the base and names are etched. No one will be forgotten, lest not in his own mind.

(Rey leaves after the memorial, wished to stay and give respect, and stood at the General's side with a set look on her face. Before she goes, she makes Poe promise to look after Finn. "He talks about you," she says, "I trust you because he does". A ringing endorsement that makes him feel warm in his chest. He swears, although it isn't necessary, and bounces on the tip toes of her toes when she hugs him goodbye).

BB-8 wakes him up once. Whirrs hysterically because the unit cannot fully understand what is happening to his human. For all the technology within, BB-8 is still young and there are things too complicated for his processing to understand - or perhaps that's what Poe tells himself so he doesn't have to speak about it.

They seem worse now, the dreams. Not just him, but everyone they lost, everyone they might lose.

Finn comes every night and has the skin pealed from his bones. It makes Poe wretch. He visits his sleeping friend every day, watches over and tells himself that Finn is in one piece, that he will wake soon - the doctors were assured of that. But the terrors are vivid and sear into his eyeballs until it's all he sees.

Finn awakens the night Poe wakes with his throat raw and eyes too heavy to open. He squirms and shakes and darkness takes him to his dreams in the waking world. He can't breathe. He remembers BB-8 screeching it's worry somewhere far away and it sounds like torture, begging and he thinks please not BB, not BB.

He wakes under luminescent lights, and can't breathe through his nose. They say that he had a panic attack. They say he stopped breathing for two seconds. They say if BB-8 hadn't been there...

Poe stares at the space beside the lights and thinks about death and agony and ripped flesh and shredded wires, and can't hear anything past the alarm bells that go off around him.

He's sedated, Poe knows, because there is nothing in the darkness.

Finn is there when he comes back to himself, in hospital-wear but perched on a chair at his side. He isn't smiling - Poe doesn't like that, the worried set to his face, the way his lips press together or his eyebrows furrow. He stares and Finn stares back.

"If you wanted to see me," Finn murmurs into the room, "you didn't have to join me."

Poe wants to make a joke. He's too tired. He tries to smile, but he can't quite manage.

"You scared me," Finn says.

"Sorry," Poe croaks.

Finn shakes his head. "Not your fault."

He doesn't say anything else, and neither does Poe, but Finn stays and Poe wants to cry at the thought of not being alone.

*

It's Poe who sends Rey the message that Finn has awoken. He sleeps more than he is awake, and Poe is awake more than he is asleep, and its in the silence of night that he thinks does she know?

BB-8 records and sends, and he tries to look as if he isn't death warmed over. It fails, he thinks, just because Rey looks so concerned in her reply. "You look terrible, are you okay?" she asks, and then frowns, "You're looking after yourself right? You better be."

He laughs because it makes him feel good, and Finn looks awed when he claims that Rey is terrifying when she wants to be.

Poe calls her "Mi cabellero" on their next holovid. _My knight._

*

They give Finn a wheelchair. He's awake, but he isn't healed. Not yet. Maybe not ever, but Finn acts as if he hasn't been told when he steels himself, expression determined.

"I want to learn how to dance," he declares once. It breaks Poe's heart to think of how much Finn never had the chance to experience. He wants him to have that now.

"Yeah? I'm sure Rey would like that," Poe comments. Another one who hasn't had enough chances to do more than survive.

Finn's eyes brighten. "Do you think?"

The day that Finn stands, trembling and in need of support, but walking and alive, he presses against Poe to keep upright as they sway.

"This is dancing?" he whispers, hot breath against Poe's ear.

Poe tilts his head and his nose rubs at Finn's cheek. "Just a little bit."

*

Poe is out of medical after ten days. Finn follows three days after. Admin gives him a room in the gunners barracks, and Finn looks wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the amount of space. "It's all for me?"

"All for you," Poe promises, and his heart skips a beat when Finn turns to beam at him.

*

Finn sends the next message to Rey, excitable babble with sentences that he sometimes forgets to end in his eagerness. Poe watches fondly, snorting laughter into his hand.

That's the first night he sleeps with Finn at his back. He jerks awake with a terrifying weight upon his head, and shudders through his breaths. Finn snores in his ear, jerks awake and slurs his confusion. Poe tries to hide it, but his words shake, and Finn's face is here, hovering concerned.

"It's okay," he says, "I'm here."

Poe's eyes clench shut through burning tears, and he grips Finn's hand tightly in his own. Finn holds back.

It takes him four hours to sleep again that night, but he does sleep. That is a start.

*

Packard insists on the sleeping pills as a necessary evil. He prescribes anti-anxiety tablets and suggests therapy.

"This happens a lot," she says quietly, "to victims of trauma. There's no shame in it."

"I'm not ashamed," Poe says, and it's true. He's not. But the idea of talking about it makes it feel real, and that terrifies him.

"It is real to you," Finn points out when he's told. Another sleepless night, and Finn is pressed against him, arm over his shoulder and it's the only thing keeping him steady. "You're living it every night."

Poe doesn't answer, just curls around the body beside him and refuses to close his eyes. The next morning, when Finn snorts himself awake, and Poe must run the day on four hours of sleep, he'll echo those words back.

"You're seeing someone, about the brainwashing," he asks, and Finn confirms with a jerk of his head. He speaks about it some. There are habits he struggles to break, times where his eyes will go blank and his words monotone, where he follows orders without thinking. They're terrifying, Poe thinks.

He continues, decision made, "Do you think they have space for another session?"

*

Rey returns with Luke Skywalker. The base had been on edge for days since the message came through, and there was this buzz of excited disbelief of is it really Luke Skywalker? Finn doesn't 100% understand the importance, but he tries to, reads everything he can on jedi history and listens to every story that people are willing to tell. He recites everything he knows to Poe when they're beneath the sheets of Finn's bed, and Poe finds it too endearing to tell him that he's repeating himself, when he's so excited whilst doing it.

Poe gets to stand with Finn and General Leia when the ship arrives. He's dressed in starfighter garb and Finn is vibrating next to him. Leia is oddly still.

"Breathe," he says, and both exhale quickly.

Rey is out the door before it has fully touched the ground, takes great strides across the landing strip before she slams full-body into Finn. He clings back just as hard as she holds onto him, and Poe thinks, for a moment, that they might unsteady themselves.

"You're alive," Rey's cry is muted in his shoulder.

Finn nods. "I am. So are you."

"I am." And they laugh, a ridiculous sound of relief. They hadn't the chance for this moment, not after the battle, and Poe watches with a soft smile.

When Rey turns her gaze upon him, her smiles is huge and her cheeks are red. Poe smiles, salutes and says, "Mi cabellero."

"Poe Dameron," she declares and her arms coil around his neck. He lifts her off the ground, and she laughs, kicks her legs and demands to be put down. "You looked after him for me."

"For us," he corrects, and Rey's hold tightens for a moment.

She leaves a kiss on his cheek and takes Finn's hand, promises that they have to tell her everything she's missed.

(Leia slaps Luke, and then crushes him to her with all the strength she has. "I'm sorry about Han," he whispers, and Poe wonders whether, now that her brother is here, Leia might allow herself the time to cry.)

*

"Finn says you taught him how to dance," Rey announces one day. She holds out her hand, palm up and asks, "Can you teach me?"

Rey doesn't like to follow, wants to lead, demands it, and Poe is only happy to give it to her.

"I like dancing," she murmurs into his neck, and before she can turn him into a spin, he replies, "I'm glad."

*

Poe doesn't talk about his sessions. Finn makes it clear he's happy to listen, just as much as he's happy to share, but there's something about the privacy that the therapist's room offers that acts as a barrier from the horrors. The outside has the X-Wings; Jessika who can snort milk out of her nose; Snap with his constant upgrades, never stopping, nothing is good enough, not if this beast can be pushed just a little faster; Wexley who jokes when he's worried and smiles with his whole body.

The outside has Rey, who upon returning from training with Luke Skywalker, inserted herself into his life as if she had always been there. Poe has always been a touchy guy, but Rey craves contact in a way that he's never seen before and all too happy to aid. He's been introducing her to some of the things she missed on the arse-end of nothing that is Jakku, and her smiles light up rooms. She's the only person who knows, really knows, and sometimes she reaches out with the Force, tentatively, as if to show him that not all of it has to be bad.

The outside has BB-8, who sits at Poe's beside at night as if it's terrified of a repeat, and it makes Poe's chest ache to think that he's terrified his droid that much. BB-8 who whirrs and beeps and retells stories that Poe has heard a hundred times, and sometimes he thinks that maybe he needs to get BB's memory core checked out, but the unit always seems too pleased with each tale that Poe just hums and pretends. It's BB-8 who nudges at Poe's legs, every time he seems like he might be slipping and dragging him to shore.

The outside has Finn, and Poe is grateful for that everyday. Finn, who comes to him in the silence of the night, who crawls under the sheets and presses against Poe's sweaty form and holds him until the shaking subsides; who is brave and loyal in ways that are astounding; who laughs and makes Poe feel breathless.

He promises that it's not attachment, that is not gratitude that makes him feel this way. "It's just you," he whispers, "Just...you."

Finn kisses him first. It's eager and uncoordinated and desperate. Their teeth clang together, and their noses collide. His lips bruise. Poe presses his fingers to them hours later and they ache when he smiles.

*

"Finn said he kissed you," Rey says into his shoulder, lifts her head and meets his gaze. She looks shy and hopeful, but her voice is certain when she says, "Can you kiss me?"

Rey kisses like its a fight. Throws herself into the very centre and takes everything that comes for her. Poe feels weak at the knees, clutches at the baggy edges of her clothes, and moans in the back of his teeth. Rey responds with something pleased, pulls back to grin, all teeth and happy.

"It's good," she bounces, "Can we do it again?"

Poe will confess to feeling breathless when he says, "yes", and tips his head down to accept the next barrage of affection.

*

They don't stop. Not for years. Some days he lurches and breathes and calms and rolls over for sleep to claim him once more. Others he jerks and trembles and screams his fear until his throat is rough and too exhausted for sleep. And on those nights, Rey will plaster to his back and snore in his ear. Finn nuzzles against the dip in his chest and slur together comforting affection. Poe clings to them both and feels grounded by their solidity.

Because the nightmares might never stop, but, Poe finds, it's a lot easier to find a way out of the dark with his dear ones at his side.

 


End file.
